As an early adopter of the "Hamiltonian Moment" description of what has recently happened in the EU with the new FR-DE proposal and now the EUR750bn @EU_Commission pplan that now seem to have become a punching bag for too negative views of these developments - a thread: 1/n

1) Hamilton didn't establish a full US fiscal union, but rather managed to mutualize 35-40% of US GDP in states' debts from their "shared struggle" during the War of Independence 1775-83. Hamilton and his successors though quickly paid down this debt, so it was only 5-6% of 2/n

US GDP by the time the next big war (of 1812) broke out, relying almost wholly on tariff revenue. As such, Hamilton failed to convince his contemporaries about the benefits of a "large liquid US sovereign debt market". Redistributive US federal taxation came only with 16th 3/n

Amendment in 1913 and large-scale deficit spending outside of war years only by the Great Depression 1929-1933. As such, the Hamiltonian Moment in "US fiscal historical terms" sensibly merely means "mutualizing the costs of a shared struggle", not the establishment of the 4/n

strong well-funded federal state Hamilton had wanted - that had to wait until say Wilson or probably more aptly FDR over a century later. It is hence largely a strawman when dismissing what EU leaders are currently contemplating as falling "far short of a Hamilton Moment". 5/n

2) Yes, EUR750bn (5-6% of EU27 GDP) in common dent towards the mitigation of a common (pandemic) struggle does not create a federal Europe, but it certainly brings forward fiscal integration in the EU very considerably and in a manner far more hopeful than US fiscal history. 6/n

US federal debt issuance outside of war years didn't reach the current 5-6% of GDP levels proposed by @EU_Commission until 1929 - War of 1812/Civil War/WW1 were the only periods in which federal debts rose by more than 5% in one year. It took the Great Depression - a crisis 7/n

in some ways of similar magnitude to #Covid19 to galvanize the US federal government into issuing the currently proposed levels of new common EU27 debt in peacetime - approximately 140y after Hamilton's great feat. It has taken the EU27 a mere 63y to (probably) reach that 8/n

So :-) - "measured appropriately" we are dealing with more than a "Hamiltonian Moment" and in peacetime. Not bad at all Europe! @adam_tooze @MESandbu @mcopelov @EuroBriefing @W_Schmidt_ @joergkukies @jakob_eu @MartinSelmayr @GuntramWolff @nicolas_veron @AngelUbide @SMerler